HE'S BACK! THE MOVIE ZOMBIE'S BEST FILMS OF 2017!

Hello, all, and welcome to the Movie Zombie's first entry here on our new home at Schitznel with Noodles! Since 2008, my original blog has presented my picks for the ten best films of each year, with an occasional foray, when the movies are bad enough to call for it, into the worst pictures of the year as well. Usually, this list has come quite a bit after many other such notices that you will see; one year, I actually didn't get my top ten posted until a few days before the Academy Awards. But this time out, in the spirit of really kicking things off on the new blog right, I'm presenting my 2017 best-of as a slightly early Christmas present to all of you.

A note to bear in mind, as always: This list constitutes the best films released theatrically in 2017 that I have seen as of this writing. Not being either a) a wholly full-time film critic, or b) a man with unlimited funds, there are some pictures that are showing up on a lot of people's top tens that I have yet to check out. In some cases, the films have not yet opened in Ireland (we're actually not scheduled to get Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri until the 12th of January, and if I read things correctly, Phantom Thread won't be on Irish screens till February). In others, I just haven't been able to check them out yet, for reasons of busy-ness, mostly (apparently there's this flick floating around right now about wars with stars or something?). So it's wholly possible that when all's said and done, and I've caught up with everything that I feel like I need to see, this list might look quite different. It wouldn't be the first time that's happened. I posted my top ten list for 2016 a good couple weeks before I finally caught up with what ended up being my actual favorite film of the year. That said, here and now, at the immediate moment, these are my favorite films of the last twelve months.

I should note, however, that there a few heavily lauded films that I have seen that are not on this list because, for a myriad of reasons, they didn't seem to land for me the way they did for much of the viewing and critical establishment. The long-awaited follow-up to my all-time favorite science fiction film, Blade Runner 2049 was, for me, narratively problemetic and far, far too long, although it does indeed boast the most impressive visuals of any film this year (if Roger Deakins doesn't finally get his Oscar, he really might as well just retire). Given my interest in and sympathy with the issues it tackles, I really, really wanted to like Get Out so much more than I did, but I think this one was a victim of too much pre-release buzz and hype. I was expecting the landscape of horror to be reshifted and reborn before my very eyes. What I got was basically a longer, not-bad-but-not-life-changing Twilight Zone episode. Plus, I can't really own an opinion I have about the film, that Allison Williams turns in its best performance, without that belief making me feel like a racist. As an avowed lifelong action-film junkie, I really wish I had seen the movie you guys all apparently did when you saw Baby Driver. But despite a genuinely menacing, hateful turn by Jamie Foxx, the movie's much-lauded "musical number" chase scenes felt like nothing but a gimmick for me. Last year's Jason Bourne had better car chases...not to mention a protagonist I actually cared about. (Don't get me started on the fact that I never bought that that kid would be a fan of that music.) Finally, I guess I'm not naturally empathetic enough to feel bad for characters just because they've been dealt a bad hand by life, but the lack of backstory and context in The Florida Project sunk my ability to truly take its on-the-surface strident, abrasive characters to heart.

I wouldn't go as far as to call any of those movies flat-out bad, however. In fact, aside from a couple of early-in-the-year comedies that failed to make me laugh much (Fist Fight and CHiPs), I managed to avoid any indisputable turds in 2017. Even what was probably the worst film I saw in 2017, Underworld: Blood Wars (yeah, that was this year, though alllllllllllll the way back at the start of it), was mostly just nondescript and forgettable. Fortunately, this year saw a much better genre action spectacle directed by a woman. But we'll get to that shortly. For now, let's dive in. Here are the Movie Zombie's picks for the ten best films of 2017...

10. 

Perhaps at this point in our shared cultural history, it's not the right time to be praising a film that seeks the humor in a couple of corrupt cops, especially when one of them says things like he became a cop because "you can shoot people for basically no reason." But I have to check my Liberal in Good Standing card at the door and confess that I had a high old time at John Michael McDonagh's scabrous, bruising action comedy, centered on a pair of nattily suited roughneck lawmen who brawl, bullet-spray, and curse their way through a plot involving kiddie sex traffickers, errant toupees, a Swingin' Sixties-looking British henchman with near-jellyfish levels of sallowness, and the most unexpected side trip to Iceland in the history of motion pictures. McDonagh's hilarious everything-and-the-kitchen-skin screenplay is given gleeful life by the marvelous Michael Peña, who rips into every one-liner (and he's got a lot of them, and a lot of them are dynamite) like the gusto-powered pro he always is. Meanwhile, as his shambling, alcoholic, but perversely honorable partner, Alexander Skarsgård compels your attention with every slouch, thrown fist, and unexpected Glen Campbell interlude. These two beautifully paired performers get strong support from Theo James as a loathsome English crime lord; Malcolm Barrett as a hustler with every angle covered (except how not to stick out like a sore thumb in Reykjavik); and Stephanie Sigman, who makes Peña's interludes of domestic bliss feel genuinely blissful. Some of you might think I'm putting this one on my list just to ensure I've included a film by an Irishman, but I don't play favorites when it comes to films...unless it's War on Everyone, which is indeed one of my favorites of the year. This barely got a theatrical release back in February, but it's worth hunting down if you've got a strong stomach, a liberal ear, and a desire to laugh long and hard.

9. 

Christopher Nolan's grim, searing depiction of a military retreat that marked both Britain's arguable low point during World War II, and the moment of its impossible but inexorable pivot back onto the road to victory, Dunkirk is admittedly the kind of film it's easier to admire and respect than to like. It's relentless in its depiction of harrowing battlefield carnage (albeit in somewhat more viewer-friendly PG-13 images), and pitiless in its constant hurling of its characters from various frying pans into even more life-threatening fires. In other words, easygoing multiplex entertainment this is not. But Nolan's acumen as a director and innovative storytelling mind simply cannot be denied, as the filmmaker uses an unexpected and surprisingly effective nesting-doll narrative structure to give us a trilogy of Dunkirk tales (land, sea, and air) that converge at a key moment of truth for virtually all of the film's central players. The picture boasts strong performances across the board, particularly from newcomer Fionn Whitehead as a British lad thrown at far too tender an age into hell on earth; Mark Rylance as a stoic pleasure-boat captain who steps up with classic English courage and does not only the impossible, but the maybe-unfair-to-even-ask-for-and-expect; and wonder of wonders, pop musician Harry Styles, making an impressive feature debut as Whitehead's only-brave-on-the-surface comrade at arms. But really, the star here is Nolan and the accomplished crew he's rallied around him, most notably cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema, editor Lee Smith, and composer Hans Zimmer, who conjures some of the strangest, most overwhelming sounds of his career. I am not quite with the critics ready to call Dunkirk the best war film ever made, but it's a doubtlessly strong, effective, and memorable addition to the canon of the cinema of the "Good War."

8. 

For years, I have thought that the story of the epochal 1970s tennis showdown between crusading women's champ Billie Jean King and avowed male chauvinist Bobby Riggs would make outstanding material for a feature film. At one point in the late '90s, I even tossed around the idea of writing a script on the story myself (my then-dream casting: Sigourney Weaver and Mike Myers). And now that the story of the King / Riggs showdown has finally hit the big screen (after a 2001 TV rendition starring Holly Hunter and Ron Silver), I'm happy to report that directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris have delivered in a big way on all the promise of their source material. Working from a sharp, incisive, and deeply felt screenplay by Simon Beaufoy, the filmmakers present this legendary sports media circus as something of a backdrop to the awakening of one woman, and of an up-to-the-minute feminized consciousness that's reverberating strongly through the halls of power as we speak, and seemingly gaining in force and conviction by the day. King (a terrific, delicately lived-in performance from Emma Stone) is not only battling for recognition from the powers that be of all that she and her sisters of the court have achieved. She's also fighting to figure out who she truly is, as the attentions of her genuinely loving husband (a smartly understated turn by Austin Stowell) are increasingly drowned out by King's growing attraction to an attractive, comfortable-in-her-own-skin hairdresser (the effortlessly sympathetic Andrea Riseborough). Riggs is more of a supporting player here, but Carell gives honesty and wit to the man's never-ending attempts to hold onto both his own relevance in the wider world and man's "rightful" place at the head of every table. Dayton and Faris give the film a relaxed, convincing period atmosphere, so relaxed, in fact, that I was a bit stunned, by the time the climactic tennis match arrived, just how caught up I was in the drama...even though I knew who won the match before this movie was even made. The fight of women not just for workplace equality, but for the sheer freedom to simply be who they are, was one of the key cultural themes of 2017, and perhaps no other mainstream film dealt with that theme more directly, or more successfully, than Battle of the Sexes.

7. 

There's little in the life of a moviegoer more purely pleasurable than encountering a film that turns to be better than it really has any right or reason to be. I hadn't even really been planning on seeing Daniel Espinosa's straight-up sci-fi creature feature until I was talked into checking out a weekday afternoon screening by my best friend, who is admittedly a heavy mark for all things Jake Gyllenhaal. So imagine my surprise when Espinosa and his writers, Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick (who also gave us last year's Zombie Top 10 feature Deadpool), rallied the considerable talents of their cast and crew, and their clearly genuine love of science fiction and horror, and delivered what is arguably a better Alien movie than the actual Alien movie we also got this year. This is basically Ridley Scott's seminal 1979 space-borne creature feature, re-imagined in a contemporary setting with modern day science and technology, and a creature whose look owes more to real-world biology (but who shares the Xenomorph's implacable freight-train bloodlust). But just because it's been done before doesn't mean it can't be done well, and Life does what it does very well indeed. Espinosa devises a number of deviously effective set pieces, and the picture boasts some gratifyingly vicious violence for a 2017 studio feature. It's also helped immensely by a cast wholly committed to the spirit of the material, including Gyllenhaal as a longtime space-station inhabitant who's not yet ready to come home, but soon finds that Earth may be the only way he can save his own skin; Rebecca Ferguson as a capable crew member who struggles to keep the space station aloft as the malevolent new life form mows down her colleagues all around her; and Ariyon Bakare as a scientist who cultivates the creature's embryonic form with genuine love, and is rewarded for his pains with, well, pain, and a great deal of it. Combine this with Seamus McGarvey's moody, kinetic cinematography, a boldly ominous score from Jon Ekstrand, and some of the best special effects of the year, and you've got yourself a pure genre ride that fully earns the highest accolade a film like this can achieve: It works.

6. 

Another film that addresses the patriarchy and its uses and abuses of women, albeit in a much harsher, less life-affirming way than Battle of the Sexes, Dutch director Martin Koolhoven's brooding, near-apocalyptic western presents a villain who is nothing less than the snarling, rapacious embodiment of the male id, and a heroine who is forced to silence herself just to save her own skin, and whose troubles don't end there. Dakota Fanning, in a compelling turn, is a mute frontier wife who finds herself at deadly odds with her town's blisteringly intense new preacher, played by a scar-faced, gravel-voiced Guy Pearce, in some of the finest work this consistently strong, somewhat undervalued actor has ever done. As Koolhoven's powerhouse screenplay, one of the year's best, trips back through time to fill in the tormented shared history of Fanning and Pearce, the film brilliantly lays bare the way in which the monster of male privilege (with a strong assist from some of that old-time religion) will brook only two responses to its desire to subjugate the "weaker sex": total, unquestioning acquiescence, or the destruction of the whole world. This film, photographed by Rogier Stoffers, is full of beautiful images of abject ugliness; in particular, the indignities suffered by preacher's wife Carice Van Houten cross over into the realms of the genuinely obscene. Brimstone is clearly not a film for the timid or easily unsettled, but in its unblinking look into the heart of gendered and institutional darkness, it breaks powerful new narrative ground for the western genre, while serving as a potent and all-too-necessary reminder that, even in the Weinstein / Trump era, 'twas indeed ever thus. 

5. 

The last time we got a reboot of a beloved property about freakishly large animals living on an uncharted island, the result, Jurassic World, made my list of the worst films of the year. How marvelous, then, that no such criticisms need to be made of Kong: Skull Island, a strong candidate for the most purely entertaining blockbuster of 2017. Indie helmsman Jordan Vogt-Roberts (The Kings of Summer) graduates to the studio majors and proves himself more than up to the task, guiding this colorful, thrillingly boisterous monster mash with such verve and confidence you'd swear he's been helming creature beat-'em-ups all his life. The film makes clever visual, aural, and thematic use of its Vietnam-era setting, with imagery inspired by Apocalypse Now and a soon-to-be-decommissioned military man (Samuel L. Jackson) who finds in the titular great ape the new war he's been looking for now that the evacuation of Saigon is a reality. Still, the historical-thematic concepts never get in the way of a giant-lizard-walloping hoot of a movie, with cinematography by Larry Fong that's equal parts grandeur and surrealism, and monster battles that are among the most enjoyable theater-shaking set pieces of the year. Tom Hiddleston and Brie Larson do what they can with the not-much they're given to work with, but the picture benefits greatly from skilled character-actor turns from Jackson, John Goodman, and the absolutely delightful John C. Reilly, as a marooned World War II veteran with equal parts heroism and Hopalong Cassidy old-coot nuttiness in his blood. Normally I am not much for the presumptuous setting-up-a-sequel finales so common among contemporary tentpole pictures, but as far as I'm concerned, Vogt-Roberts (hope he's coming back) and his team can't get Kong 2: Kong Harder to theaters nearly fast enough.

And speaking of franchises for which I want the next installment right the hell now...

4. 

When I walked out of the second installment of the Keanu Reeves-starring super-assassin action franchise, I commented to my companion that, if they keep up what they're doing, the John Wick saga might go down as one of the greatest franchises in action-cinema history. In fact, it's only the fact that there's been just two Wick films so far that is keeping me from adding the films to the canon right at this moment. The original 2014 installment, starring a never-better Reeves as a legendary dealer of death provoked out of retirement by the senseless murder of his beloved puppy dog (it makes beautiful sense in the context of the story, believe me), was declared by me to be the best straight-up action film of its year, and it gives me great pleasure to say that the second Wick adventure, again directed by former stuntman Chad Stahelski and scripted by the madly clever and inventive Derek Kolstad, easily achieves that benchmark of distinction as well. Here, Wick is again pulled back into the fray, this time to answer a marker that binds him in service to a ruthless crime lord (Riccardo Scamarcio), and the resultant opera of bullets and blood sees Wick running and gunning for his life as open season is declared on him for every professional assassin on the globe. Kolstad's script continues to deepen the bizarre world-of-assassins mythology of the original film (you will never think of the word "sommelier" the same way again), and Stahelski matches the strange creativity of the material with set pieces that push the bounds of pop action surrealism. From a falling-down-stairs fistfight between Reeves and rival hitman Common, to a close-quarters duel that finds them exchanging silenced gunshots amidst an oblivious subway-station crowd, to a climactic pane-crashing brawl between Reeves and henchwoman Ruby Rose in an art-gallery hall of ever-shifting mirrors, this picture delivers images that are like a Platonic ideal of action-fan bliss. And it's all held together by Reeves's never-forcing-it, effortlessly controlled lead performance, and the sheer commitment he shows to making the action, gunplay, and stuntwork looks as convincing and dynamic as humanly possible. The John Wick films are genuinely something special, and action fans let down by recent entries in long-running, much-beloved action series are doubtlessly keeping their breaths held on this one. Here's hoping Stahelski, Kolstad, Reeves, et al. continue to deliver the high-powered goods. 

3. 

It's hard to think of a 2017 film whose potential success or failure seemed to matter to more people, for more varied reasons, than Wonder Woman. Sure, the Resident Evil and Underworld franchises had put strong, capable women at the head of action-fantasy franchises before, but those were B-picture genre fare, not megabudget, summer-tentpole blockbusters. Besides which, Wonder Woman was a comic-book superhero movie, the first entry in the era since such films became the seeming be-all and end-all of the cinematic landscape to give a female super-being the solo spotlight (and with a woman, Patty Jenkins, behind the camera as well). This, when the previous year's dust-up over the feminization of Ghostbusters exposed the dark, misogynistic undercurrents of the fanboy culture, and eight short months after a presidential election that sent women the loud and clear message that YOU DON'T MATTER. The release of Wonder Woman, then, like the presidency of the man who left office to make room for an unapologetic and nakedly boastful serial abuser of women and girls, was seen not just as a one-off occurrence, but as a referendum on an entire group of people. By now, we all know that Wonder Woman was a titanic box-office and critical success, but even with my approval of all the extra-cinematic reasons people were pulling for the film to succeed, it still makes me happy that I can praise the film not just for what it means, but for what it is: A rock-solid, rousing, passionately made, and peerlessly entertaining action-fantasy spectacle. A world's worth of credit for this must go to Gal Gadot, who embodies a role that had passed through a number of hands during this film's long development history with such effortless, flag-planting rightness that it's virtually impossible to imagine anyone else who could have done it better. Gadot's Wonder Woman is a sleek but furious fighter, a firm defender of justice and good, but still wonderfully human enough in her Amazonian identity to forge a moving, engaging relationship with Steve Trevor, an American fighter pilot played by Chris Pine with grace, wit, and tremendous chemistry with Gadot. The film features other sharp turns from Connie Nielsen as Gadot's regal Amazon-queen mother; Saïd Taghmaoui as a spy with a Shakespearean's soul; and the imperiously awesome Robin Wright as the general aunt who schools Gadot in the ways of war. Jenkins pulls off the film's emotional high points and action beats with practiced aplomb, taking full advantage of Gadot's athleticism and prowess without ever turning her into eye candy, and she manages the film's World War I-era setting without ever selling short the very real and tragic human cost of the conflict that provides the backdrop for this popcorn entertainment. I know many women, and a few men too, who literally wept when Wonder Woman, for the first time in full battle raiment, steps onto no man's land in her first major action moment of the film. I did not shed a tear, but the metaphor of the moment was not lost on me. In pride of place, in the land of this film, there is indeed no man. And as Jenkins and Gadot make marvelously clear, there does not need to be.

2. 

For as much as I loved Wonder Woman, I cannot deny that the Amazonian warrior princess is a character that never personally meant much to me. Spider-Man, on the other hand, was side by side with Batman as my favorite comics hero during my comic-reading middle-school and teenage years. I greatly enjoyed the first two Tobey Maguire-starring, Sam Raimi-directed Spider-films, but agreed with many about the deeply problematic nature of Spider-Man 3, and found both of the Marc Webb-helmed, Andrew Garfield-featuring Amazing Spider-Man films to be largely varying degrees of bad. So my optimism, when I heard Marvel Studios was again taking personal charge of the Spider-Man character in its forthcoming feature efforts, was guarded at best. I was bolstered by the highly satisfactory appearance of the wall-crawler (embodied with gusto and genuine teenage heart by British actor Tom Holland) in last summer's Captain America: Civil War, and am thrilled to report that the new Spider-Man's first solo headlining feature just might be my favorite Spider-Man picture to date. Holland takes to the role of Spider-Man like a duck to water, and he's ably abetted by a top-flight cast, starting with Robert Downey, Jr. who by now could play Tony Stark / Iron Man in his sleep, but still always gives the character his snarky, high-flying all. Jacob Batalon is a sweetly funny, star-is-born delight as Holland's nerdy pal, and Michael Keaton, graduating from his Batman heroic status to full-on supervillain mode, is a chillingly down-to-earth, genuinely dangerous villain as the Vulture, whose motivations for his crimes make him among the year's most complex, perversely sympathetic blockbuster antagonists. Director Jon Watts delivers plenty of slam-bang Spider-Man action, much of it courtesy of a brilliantly tech-oriented, frankly rather frightening reconception of the Vulture's flight suit. But he spends just as much time and attention anatomizing the pains and struggles of high school, a time in which virtually every kid feels like an outsider, a freak of nature...and I'm talking about the ones who don't have super-strength and can't walk on walls. The result is heartfelt, exciting, and stirring in a very honest and sincere fashion, and assures us that, in the capable hands of Watts and Holland, Spider-Man has indeed come home.

1. 

In a year that saw comedians, filmmakers, and writers grow increasingly unsparing in their efforts to speak vicious, impolite, often caustic, and deeply necessary truth to power, it is still impressive to contemplate the audacity of imagination it took to create a film like The Death of Stalin. Director / co-writer Armando Iannucci (best known for his acclaimed politically satirical TV series Veep and The Thick of It, the latter of which spun off into the Oscar-nominated film In the Loop) somehow looked at the torturous, actually quite literally deadly political and military machinations that followed the 1953 death of the supreme Soviet leader, and his reaction was, "Now this might make a funny movie!" And it has. Man alive, it really has, the funniest, nastiest, sharpest, most brutal bit of historically based black comedy to emerge on cinema screens in many a moon. Iannucci, working from a scalpel-precise screenplay he penned with David Schneider, Ian Martin, and Peter Fellows (from a screenplay by Fabien Nury), presents a surprisingly-true-to-the-facts rendition of the power struggles that greeted Stalin's unexpected demise, and in the process makes one thing painfully clear: Politicians, no matter the time, no matter the place, no matter the context, have always been just the worst. But their pettiness, psychoses, duplicity, shamelessness, and sheer blinkered idiocy frequently does not prevent them from still wielding their power with hard, often deadly consequences. Iannucci brilliantly recognizes and gives due diligence to this dichotomy, in this comedy that includes slapstick tumbles down stairs and still climaxes with one of the main characters being shot in the head, his corpse burning to a pile of ashes in a courtyard. Iannucci's direction is fleet-footed, almost balletic in its comic deftness; the film is edited to turn on a dime, and whirls along amid a welter of powerhouse one-liners and spry, sly comic exchanges. He's greatly abetted by the efforts of a deep bench of brilliant actors. Steve Buscemi, as Khrushchev, dazzles as a man clearly trying to keep his sanity in check, as doing so is the only means of surviving the lunatic system in which he has found himself. Jeffrey Tambor (in a performance given before the recent allegations against him) is impressively befuddled as Stalin's clueless deputy minister. Jason Isaacs is all jutting chin and blustery Yorkshire-accented profanity as chief military commander Zhukov. A blessedly welcome Michael Palin is the soft-spoken, entirely-too-loyal foreign minister Molotov. Olga Kurylenko effortlessly conjures the real human stakes of Stalin's regime as a vengeful concert pianist, and Andrea Riseborough and Rupert Friend are a stitch as Stalin's children, who are as different as oil and thick-headed, baselessly self-satisfied water. But it's Simon Russell Beale's spymaster Beria, all low-toned, insinuating orders and hissed, cold-blooded threats, who dominates my memories of the film. Beale's performance is commanding, brutally funny, and truly frightening, a heart-of-evil anatomization that reminds us that one of the most dangerous things about government of, by, and for the idiocracy is that occasionally, just occasionally, someone can slip through who sort of knows what they're doing and really cause some damage.

And I'm not gonna lie to you. In a year in which the country of my heritage has been beset by easily the single worst presidential administration of its short history, and at least partly thanks to behind-the-scenes machinations by the Russian government, it gives me great personal pleasure to laud as the best of the year a film whose main message is that Russian politicians are greedy, traitorous, willfully ignorant assholes. Because, honestly, screw those people.

The Death of Stalin premieres in the US at next month's Sundance Film Festival. I highly recommend it...obviously.